Imagine finding that the little gold-haired girl — so lovely that performers sometimes touched her for good luck before going on the trapeze — was herself drawn to the trapeze and at twelve (and still gold-haired) was billed as the youngest aerial artist in the world! The father still carried in his wallet a limp handbill and it was this, carefully unfolded so as not to part it at the folds, that began the father’s friendship with Phil. So Fate rewards those who clean up after animals with children who make them proud!
But Phil knew Fate punishes the proud, and dashes hope. One night before a thousand faces the child fell from the high wire, and was carried, broken, to her dressing room. It was this Phil saw in the father’s eyes, and this that made the father desert the circus to wander from one brief job to another. After such tragedy he never complained, and Phil had found him a fine man with a team and admired him for his guts and stubborn devotion to the ragged Bible that had failed him, that he read at night by the light of a lantern, his huge shadow against the wall of the tent, his massive head bowed to the words of God, and Phil felt with him; for Phil, too, knew what it was to grieve.
Possessed of the most rigid morals himself, Phil seldom judged those more unfortunate than he in that department. Among those who worked for him and whom he was proud to call friend was an ex-con. The fellow need not have confessed to Phil, for Phil’s shrewd sense told him all he needed to know — he saw the eyes, caught the bitter laugh, saw the terrible sunburn of one who has spent recent years in the shadows. Just as the old circus man carried a Bible as another might carry a side arm, so this ex-con carried a small limp-leather edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Phil was not one to inquire, not one to remark on the scar — it looked like a pocketknife — for who knows why people do the things they do, who knows the pressures? What mattered, what Phil admired, is that this man had carried something of value away from prison, the chilly strength to face with dignity the inevitable end of his life — death in some charity ward or Cabbage Patch, some shanty town on the edge of some Herndon, mourned only by another (perhaps) like himself.
This man called Joe had carried away from prison a remarkable skill, if a simple one — a fantastic artistry in working in horsehair, to twist and braid, an art so refined it had surely been got only at the expense of total despair.
This man called Joe was either young at forty or old at thirty, and in a cigar box he kept several watch chains woven of black and white hair, no thicker than a pencil. Phil’s quick mind calculated that each chain contained a hundred yards of hair. Yes, a man given unlimited time can do anything.
The summer evenings after work were long; the sun lingered over the mountains, reddish-hued through the smoke of distant forest fires; and then sank suddenly, trailing bloody streamers. Phil liked it that there always followed on the heels of the vanished sun a stunning silence, an unearthly hush, and how into it crept little sounds — as night-things creep into the dark — the whispers of willow leaves and branches kissing, touching, water caressing and fondling the smooth stones in the creek, lazy human voices, close in friendship, seeping out through the canvas of the tents. That vanished sun brought forth a sudden coolness that caused the mist to lift and drift wraithlike over the creek, heavy with the scent of new hay.
After their supper had settled a little, the eight men who drove the mowing machines ducked out of their tents, paused to belch and stretch, and then wandered to the hitching racks where they had drawn up their machines before unhitching their teams. The mowing machine was a simple rig — two-wheeled like a chariot, but with a seat centered over the axle. Heavy but maneuverable, they were ideal vehicles behind half-broken horses so long as the cutter bar was drawn up vertically. But once the bar was let down to skim over the ground, all seven feet of it, the sharp sections sliding back and forth over the ledger plates, no more dangerous machinery existed. So innocent, so dangerous. Not a year passed but somewhere in that broad valley a man was thrown from the seat into the path of the cutter bar; he was lucky to lose only a foot or a hand as he screamed and bled or lay in shock. Because they handled half-broken horses and lived in danger, because after work when others loafed they removed the cutter bars from their machines and sharpened them on grindstones they straddled like bicycles, delicately holding the dangerous bar — because of this they commanded extra pay; they were accorded a quaint deference: their tents were the newest, their voices were listened to, they first picked over the platters of meat and claimed the finest steaks.
Phil sat cross-legged before the tent he was pleased to share with three of the old-timers, two mowers among them. He watched the mowers sharpening their sickle bars; the scream of steel on whirling stone enough to set a man’s teeth on edge. The man Joe, the ex-con, had been a mower; and he had not returned.
And he had promised.
‘I’ll be back,’ he’d promised Phil; they had shaken hands. The man was either dead or in prison. How else explain it? It could not be a simple betrayal, for Phil felt something between them, a recognition.
It was evening, the hour of speculation; Phil pondered how one man passes a gift on to another, how like the very chains and lengths of rawhide rope a man makes, human character is woven on a strand of this and a strand of that — sometimes beautifully and sometimes poorly. It was in simple homage to Joe and to Bronco Henry, those two braiders and plaiters, that Phil braided now. Each had taught him something.
Beside him, in a tin washbasin, he had a big handful of rawhide strips soaking in water. Bleached white from the sun, swollen in the water, they resembled stout worms.
Phil had at first no intention of braiding more than a foot or two of rawhide rope; he wanted only to prove to himself that he still braided well. Such a rope, dried carefully out of the sun and finished off with tallow, was as strong as hemp and more accurate in the corral — an intelligent serpent. The man Joe claimed he had refused fifty dollars for the thirty-foot coil he kept in a pasteboard suitcase and Phil didn’t doubt him; he admired the man’s refusal to sell for money the work made with his gifted hands: a scorn of money and a respect for time was something else the man had learned in prison; so had Bronco Henry learned a scorn of Death; and in that way, too, had removed himself from the usual tribe of men.
Phil had just begun the actual braiding when his sorrel, haltered at the hitching rack, suddenly raised his head, snorted, and whinnied. Phil was proud the sorrel had the keen nose, eye and ear of the wild thing, and in a moment, caught between the sudden silence and the scream of steel on grindstones, Phil heard the ring of harness chains.
George, then, in spring wagon. Phil knew those chains.
Yes, George all right, the spring wagon loaded with cartons of canned goods and a quarter of beef wrapped in a white shroud. But not only the canned goods and the beef, but other baggage — Rosie-Posie sitting straight up there beside brother George, and the sissy-boy sitting in the end of the wagon, his feet in new white tennis shoes just clearing the stubble. They were quite a sight, coming in through the willows into the broad park, George a bump on a log with his hat straight on his head, the woman with a red scarf tied around her head, twisted around, a scarf Phil supposed she thought attractive or — as women said then — ‘stunning.’ Stunning was right. It reminded him of nothing so much as what a squaw might wear. How hard that floozy worked at looking like Somebody!
The wagon squeaked slowly past the open tents; the men watched closely; the woman looked straight ahead, but Phil saw she had colored a bit. George drew the team up before the cookshack, and the cook, a thin old geezer with a towel around his pot walked out smoking a cigar; when he saw the woman, he tossed it away.
George clambered down grunting greetings to the cook. The woman started to clamber down, but before she got started, the boy came around to give her a hand — Little Lord Fauntleroy helping Mama out of the carriage — a pretty little formality. Now the woman arranged the rag she had on her head, and then glanced down at the new high-laced boots bought, Phil supposed, fr
om the catalog that came to the ranch from back East, a place where you bought compasses and guns and such, a place Phil humorously dubbed Abbie, Dabbie & Bitch, a place fancied by the Old Lady and the Old Gent at Christmastime.
Maybe the boy and Phil saw something in the woman that George hadn’t, that she really needed to be helped down. Was she still boozing it up? A person had to fall down under George’s nose before he noticed a thing like that. Frankly, it had surprised Phil that she was one to booze it up; and at first he’d thought maybe it was only that once she’d tried to speak up to him. But he had checked; Yup! She’d been watering the booze — the oldest trick in the world — and even snitched a couple of bottles. He’d bet six bits he could lay his hands on where she’d hidden them. All he had to do was wait now for the woman to hang herself; her personality was alcoholic, as she might have known from her husband’s doctor-books. The very first time she got woozy on George’s booze. Boozy-Woozy-Rosie!
Little Lord Fauntleroy was likewise dolled up in new duds. With the new tennis shoes, he sported a new pair of levis. Now, in that country the first thing a man did with a new pair was toss them in the creek for a few days with a rock to hold them down and let them soak till they shrank to size and lost the blue dye and the filler. You could tell a dude because a dude didn’t do that.
Little Lord F. stood a moment beside his mama and then Phil saw him look across the opening toward a willow where a family of magpies had built them a ratty-looking nest of sticks and twigs. Then big as you please the boy suddenly began to walk across the space before the open tents, Phil guessed to investigate.
During lazy evenings down there, drowsy evenings fragrant with the smudges the men made of green hay to keep off the mosquitoes, Phil had told the men about the boy, how he shut himself in his room with his books and pictures, how the boys in Beech had jeered at him as one who didn’t know a fly from a foul ball, how the boy made and arranged paper flowers, and the men doubtless resented — as they were bound to — this little monster not boy and not girl, this son of a two-bit sawbones who now rode in a Burbank wagon simply because his maw had a pretty face. Itinerant workers — many infected with wobbly principles — were quick to sense injustice.
Phil continued with his braiding and plaiting of the rawhide strips, holding each one up to let it drain. The cleverness of his fingers freed his eyes to watch the boy traverse the opening; at each step the stiff denim of the overalls went zip-zip-zip as leg passed leg. Stiff as a stick-man the boy moved with the slightest feminine twitch of hips Phil could hardly stand, the new tennis shoes vulnerable and white. The woman, a little apart while George jawed with the cook, watched the boy’s progress, and Phil saw her stiffen when the first sharp whistle flew like an arrow as the boy passed the second tent; the whistle men give a girl. Why, the boy was better off dead than to attract such scorn.
That rude whistle, a result of Phil’s stories and as audible to George and to the woman as to the boy, convinced Phil that the men looked to him and not to George as the boss of the ranch; for not only had the woman’s presence failed to protect the boy, but so had George’s.
Well-a-day!
But Phil would say one thing for the kid. He neither paused nor faltered in running that strange gauntlet before the open tents. He seemed not even to hear, but once past the watching, grinning men, he looked up into the willows at the tawdry nest, at the tottering, chattering young magpies who hadn’t even the gumption to go to roost.
Phil watched, braiding. The kid didn’t need to return to his mama in the way he’d come. He could walk behind the tents, and thus avoid the grins and eyes.
The kid turned, and began to walk right past the open tents again. Strangely, there were no whistles.
Now, Phil always gave credit where credit was due. The kid had an uncommon kind of guts. Wouldn’t it be just interesting as hell if Phil could wean the boy away from his mama? Wouldn’t it now? Why, the kid would jump at the chance for friendship, a friendship with a man. And the woman — the woman, feeling deserted would depend more and more on the sauce, the old booze.
And then what?
Here’s what. The blowup between the woman and George would come sooner than ever; for old George, slow as he was, even George was bound to see in the woman’s drinking his failure to make her happy.
It was almost too perfect.
And perfect in another, miraculous way. For at this very moment he held in his hands the means to the final solution, this just-begun rope, the gift of it the very means to begin wooing the kid away. This rope would be, so to speak, the bond between them. His hands paused and were still. He raised them from the rawhide and watched them opposed there, like two big spiders. He felt suddenly possessed, bewitched, and his whole mind was swelled with the idea; this very rope he held in his hands was the means to the end.
‘Peter …’ Softly.
The kid continued his stiff walk back toward the cook-shack where the last thin, exhausted smoke rose in vague threads from the twisted, rusted chimney and drifted and disappeared over the willows.
‘Peter …!’ Phil spoke a little sharper, because for a moment he thought the kid might dare ignore the summons.
The boy tacked suddenly like a sailboat and walked toward him, paused and shoved his hands into the pockets of the stiff new levis.
‘You want me, Mr Burbank?’
Phil’s face took on a mock puzzled look, and then he looked around, twisting his head on his neck to the right and left, as if searching for somebody. ‘Mr Burbank, you say? I don’t know any Mr Burbank. I’m Phil, Pete.’
‘Yes, Mr Burbank,’ said Peter. ‘You want me?’
‘Well now,’ said Phil. ‘I guess it’s hard for a young fellow to get used to calling an old codger like me just plain Phil — at first.’
Then he lifted the new rope. ‘Look at this, Pete.’
Peter looked at it. It seemed to Phil the rope was reflected in Peter’s eyes. ‘That’s fine work, sir.’
‘You ever do any plaiting or braiding yourself, Pete?’
‘No, sir. I never did.’
‘Pete,’ Phil said, ‘I’ve been thinking. We sort of got off on the wrong foot, you and me, at the beginning.’
‘Did we, sir?’
‘No, forget the sir stuff,’ and Phil coughed a little. ‘That was my impression. That sort of thing can happen to people, you know. People who get to be good friends.’
‘I suppose it could.’
‘Well, know what?’
‘What — what, Phil?’
‘Now you see? You did it. Called me Phil. I’m going to finish up this rope and give it to you, finish it up and give it to you and show you how to use it. Now, you’re going to be here on the ranch, you might as well learn to rope a little, what? And ride? Sort of a lonesome place out here, Pete, unless you get into the swing of things.’
‘Thank you — Phil. How long do you expect it would take to finish that rope?’
Phil again had the odd impression that the entire rope was reflected in Peter’s eyes; the boy was interested, all right. Phil shrugged. ‘Oh, I imagine working off and on I could finish it before you go back to school.’
Peter was looking closely at the rawhide strips soaking in the basin. ‘It won’t be very long then, Phil,’ Peter said.
‘You just stop by next time you come down here to camp,’ Phil said. ‘You come on down and see how I’m coming along.’
And the boy actually smiled at him, and turned and walked back to the wagon, his stiff new levis going zip-zip-zip, like scissors.
He’s a peculiar one, Phil thought. Yes, sir. No, sir. Inhuman kid. Talked like a Victrola record. Thank you, sir; but like the kid said, it wouldn’t be very long now.
13
Peter longed for his tidy room in Herndon, longed to play chess with his friend, the long, lanky bespectacled son of the high school teacher who, like Peter himself, had never before had a friend, who burst into uncontrollable giggles that left him weak and moist-e
yed. He longed to talk with this friend of the possibility of God and to exchange descriptions of their futures, the one to be a famous surgeon, the other a famous professor of English. First as a joke and then quite seriously they came to address one another as Doctor and as Professor; but never in front of people.
These two had come to know a different Herndon, the Herndon of the nighttime, the houses dark except for a light in the hall, stores dark but for small, economical naked bulbs over the rococo cash registers; they knew of the men moving up and down the back stairway to the Red-White-and-Blue Rooms, of the prowl car of the chief of police turning a corner on some unspeakable errand. But especially they knew the railroad station, the stiff wooden benches vacant, the waiting room silent but for the murmur of water weakly bubbling out from the drinking fountain, and the sudden hysterical chatter of the telegraph in the cramped room where their friend, the night telegrapher, stared into space taking messages from God knew where. Lonely himself, this man welcomed these strange boys who came to drink the bitter black coffee he brewed over a Sterno can; to them he confessed his dreams to leam Spanish well and then go to Argentina, where there were opportunities. He was indeed studying Spanish by correspondence and they saw no reason why his dreams should not come true and they told him so.
‘Buenos noches,’ they learned to say when they came to him at night, ‘Que tal?’ and he would rise from where he sat before the telegraph key, slip the lock, and let them in. No telling, if some railroad inspector should happen in! Nobody else in all Herndon was received in that room at night, that holy place; nobody else understood their longing for the far-off places the telegraph told of, the future professor and future surgeon.
That he and his mother might know those far-off places, Peter welcomed his new relationship with Phil; he must ignore the reproach in his mother’s eyes. Few human beings, he thought, understood much; women least of all.
He stood in her pink room now, a room in which he would never feel comfortable, for there a stranger had the right to play husband, and part of Peter’s plan or not, that man’s things were side by side with his mother’s things in the closet, his sharp straightedged razors beside her perfumes and creams — George’s things, the things of a man who had not yet proved himself, had done no more than introduce his mother to the governor of the state at a dinner she didn’t talk about.
The Power of the Dog Page 20